Drama is the spine of cinema, the genre where performance, script and direction have nowhere to hide. From the courtroom pressure of 12 Angry Men to the generational weight of The Godfather, it has always rewarded patience and attention. See what Macca makes of the best and worst of it below.
Rating: 4.0★
There is a moment early in Sexy Beast where Gal Dove, retired safecracker, is dozing by his swimming pool in the Spanish sunshine, the very picture of a man who has successfully left his old life behind, and you think: this is going to be a pleasant little film about
Rating: 3.0★
Before Shaft is anything else, it is that theme. Isaac Hayes's wah-wah-drenched, Oscar-winning title track, playing over John Shaft striding through the streets of early-seventies New York, is one of the great movie openings in the history of cinema, so effortlessly cool that the
Rating: 3.5★
My wife suggested we watch Deliverance, partly on the strength of our shared soft spot for Burt Reynolds, and partly because it sits on a couple of the "greatest ever" lists I'm slowly working through. I was happy to oblige. The only snag was that I&
Rating: 3.5★
(500) Days of Summer opens by telling you, in as many words, that it is "not a love story, but a story about love." That is true, as far as it goes, but I would argue the framing is still a little off: this is a story about
Rating: 2.5★
Let me be straight with you: I kept having to remind myself, the whole way through Rags, to judge it for what it actually is rather than what I might want it to be. And what it is, plainly, is a straight-to-television teen musical. A modern, gender-flipped
Rating: 2.5★
You could be forgiven, watching The Arbor, for not quite knowing what it is you are looking at. There are actors, clearly performing scenes, and yet it plainly isn't fiction. So is it a documentary, a mockumentary, something else again? The answer, it turns out, is a clever
Rating: 3.5★
There is something quietly extraordinary about the project behind A Thousand Suns, and it starts with a piece of cinema history. Back in 1973, the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty made Touki Bouki, a landmark of African cinema about two young lovers dreaming of escape to Paris. It is a
Rating: 3.5★
Whisky is a strange one to recommend. On paper, everything about it should be a chore, and yet I found it quietly gripping in a way I did not see coming. That almost never happens to me with films like this, and I am still not entirely sure how it
Rating: 3.5★
There is a slightly awkward truth I have had to make my peace with after working my way through a fair chunk of Ingmar Bergman's filmography: I keep coming away respecting these films rather than loving them. I admire them. I think about them afterwards. And then I
Rating: 3.0★
Ousmane Sembène spent his whole career pointing his camera at injustice, and Moolaadé turned out to be his last word. That alone gives it a particular weight. When a filmmaker of his stature, widely considered the father of African cinema, chooses this as the thing he leaves behind, you sit
Rating: 2.0★
I should say at the outset that I am plainly the wrong audience for Past Lives, and I know it. That admission feels necessary before anything else, because what follows is going to read as a minority report on a film that a great many people I respect absolutely adore,
Rating: 2.5★
If you've seen Ari Aster's Midsommar, you've already met the ghost of Picnic at Hanging Rock, whether you realised it or not. Peter Weir's 1975 film, one of the most revered things Australian cinema has produced, is the clear ancestor of that
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free